and how old was I, and in what grade,
and was the school an easy one or strict
and were any of those horses mine.
I wanted to finish my sketch because it was the third time I’d tried
to draw those geese and they were finally starting
to look like geese and not chickens,
but she was jabbering so much, and I didn’t want to be rude,
so I told her everything she wanted to know, and especially
that we were both in sixth grade, even though she was older
(she got held back after that year in Mexico),
and that Longwood Middle School was strict in some ways
and easy in others,
and then (I watched her real careful when I said this)
I told her straight out that I lived
only with my daddy, a construction worker, in the trailer,
and we rented that space from Mr. Kesey, who owned the farm,
and that my momma had died
of a one-week pneumonia when I was seven,
and most of the horses belonged to people who didn’t live here,
and I earned money cleaning and walking them,
and then I told her I needed to be up at the barn at four o’clock
to groom Ella for Mr. Fitz, and she asked
if she could come, too.
She didn’t seem to care that I was almost a whole year younger
or that I wasn’t rich
or that I didn’t play sports
or have a mother
or nice clothes.
That was a year ago, and Tiffany and me have been friends
ever since.
We ride the same bus, which stops for me at the end of the lane,
and the rest of the kids who have moved in,
they all think I live in the big farmhouse,
and Tiffany has never told them
different.
If you think about it,
it doesn’t make much sense that we are friends:
She’s athletic—I’m not.
She has a regular family (a mother, father, little brother)—I just have Daddy.
She’s real popular in school—I’m not.
She loves to talk—I don’t.
She’s Catholic—I don’t go to church.
Her family has lots of money—we just get by.
Her father works for some company in that big corporate center near the turnpike and flies all over the country for meetings.
He drives a new BMW.
Mine puts up the walls and nails down the floors of the houses that people like Tiffany live in.
He drives a ten-year-old Ford pickup.
I guess I’m telling you this because Mrs. Yocum told me
to write about the things I might ask you
if you were here. I guess I’d ask you
how two people who are so different
can stay friends. I’d ask you about the friends you had
when you grew up in Savannah.
Tiffany’s only in one of my classes
(Mr. Krasinski’s math, and he doesn’t let us talk),
and her popular jock friends treat me like I’m
invisible. But Tiffany always says hi to me in the halls, and sometimes
she sits with me at lunch (but not always),
and she makes her mother beep the horn
when they drive by on the way to
basketball games, lacrosse matches and practices,
or when she sees me out walking the horses
or tossing tennis balls for the dog.
The truth is, sometimes I worry
about Tiffany. She’s always busy.
Sometimes she looks as tired as Daddy
after one of his overtime days. Take
yesterday, for example: She came up to the barn
after lacrosse practice
(at school, it doesn’t start till the second week of March,
but Tiffany’s real good, so she plays on a club team
that practices indoors in the winter
and competes in tournaments all year).
I was grooming Ella, and the other horses were all
in their stalls with their blankets on,
munching sweet feed and corn,
and the mother cat was nursing her newborn kittens.
Tiffany brushed the snow off her sneakers, plopped herself
down on a hay bale, and before we started to talk—
her back propped straight up against the wall—
she fell asleep.
6.
When my best friend Tina moved to Cleveland
at the end of fifth grade, it was
the second-worst thing
that ever happened.
You didn’t know Tina (we became
best friends in third grade, the year after you died),
but we were the same
in many ways…. Her real father died when she was five,
and she lived in a tiny apartment over the 7-Eleven
with her mother and younger brother.
Tina loved to draw as much as I do, so we’d spend
part of every weekend
lying on her mother’s old sheepskin in the living room,
our colored pencils scattered everywhere,
making pictures of our pets
and the kids we knew from school.
But then Tina’s mother got remarried. Tina’s stepdad
worked at a car parts factory in Philadelphia
that shut down
and relocated all of its workers
to Ohio.
I wrote to her for a while, and she wrote back,
but then I stopped.
It hurt too much to hear how she had
a new house,
a new school (that she really liked),
and her own pony (Slim Jim) in the yard.
After that, I didn’t try to make new friends.
After that, except for Blake and Ella,
I stayed pretty much to myself.
Then along came Tiffany, like a small hurricane,
and somehow we clicked.
We are not the same kind of friends
as me and Tina were—
Tina was more like my twin—
she liked almost everything I liked,
and her family was poor,
and her home was small and plain,
and, for a while, she had only one parent….
Me and Tiffany are not like that—
we come from really different families, and we don’t
have a lot in common,
but for some strange reason that I can’t explain,
we get along just fine.
7.
Daddy drove right past the Brandywine River Museum
on the way to Delaware. We go just over the state line
every other Saturday to buy food and household supplies
at the grocery. It’s a lot cheaper
than anywhere in Pennsylvania, and you don’t
have to pay tax. Daddy likes that.
My stomach got all fluttery when we stopped at the red light
on Route 1, right near the entrance and the neat
gray and tan sign that sits out near the side of the road.
I wanted so bad to ask him if we could stop and go in
after we’d done all our errands,
but it felt just like it does when I’m with Mrs. Yocum,
or when Mr. Hendershot asks me a history question
I know the answer to
but I can’t make the picture in my head
into the words he wants to hear
and before you know it he’s asked someone else
and then my picture disappears.
I still haven’t told Daddy about
my getting that anonymous membership. I’m afraid he’ll say
I can’t go. You know, he still keeps a photo of you
/>
inside your old sketchbook in his truck,
but he turns away whenever I
pick up my own drawing pad and pencil.
I suppose I might be starting
to look more like you did that summer
when he met you at the Savannah College of Art and Design,
when you would sit and draw under those big old magnolias
and he was working construction on one of the dorms
and you asked him to pose for a sketch
because you liked his smile
and he said he would
if you would come with him to dinner. I never
saw that sketch. I’m afraid to ask Daddy
if he still has it.
I was in first grade when you
told me that, remember? I drew a Crayola picture
of a man and a woman standing under a big tree, holding hands
and smiling, and you taped it to our refrigerator.
I imagine you went to art museums in Savannah,
and maybe you even went to some here in Pennsylvania, and maybe
you even went to the Brandywine River Museum.
And if you did, that would be
another reason Daddy wouldn’t like me going there,
wouldn’t want one more thing to remind him
that right up until the week you died,
what you liked to do best
was dance your pencil across a blank page
and make something come alive.
8.
We got our report cards. There was a
note attached to mine:
Georgia,
I hope you’re making time to write in that diary. You can make an appointment during school or afterward, any day but Friday, if you want to talk about anything at all.
Mrs. Yocum
That was nice, I guess. I still have no idea what she expected
me to say about myself when
we had our little visits. I know my life
is not perfect. I know everyone thinks I’m quiet because
you died. Maybe they’re a little bit right.
Maybe I’m naturally shy, like Daddy.
But that doesn’t mean I need to be on some “At Risk” list
like it’s a sure thing I’m going to start hanging out behind
the Acme to sniff glue with Danita and Sam,
or go smoking with Marianne and her friends,
or steal stuff from the mall with Ronnie.
I mean, what exactly
have I done to get my name on that list? Absolutely
nothing, as far as I can tell.
Truth is, I don’t know why I’m not more bad than I am,
or why I’m not hanging out with them.
Lord knows I have plenty of time after school,
without Daddy here,
to go anywhere I want and find
some trouble. It’s just that I don’t mind spending my free time
hot-walking horses or playing with Blake
or just sitting down by the pond,
watching the geese and frogs, being still
and thinking. When I’m bored, my hands always seem to find
a pencil or a piece of charcoal
(Miss Benedetto gives me the old ones
’cause the school orders new boxes every three months
whether she needs them or not), and before I know it,
it’s an hour or two later and I have to
set the table, make dinner, and start my homework.
In case you want to know,
I’m not the smartest in seventh grade,
but I do all right. I do what I have to do
to get by.
This time I got three C’s, two B’s, and one A (in art, of course).
But I’m smart enough to know I don’t want to live
in this trailer forever, and since I don’t seem to have
a lot of family looking out after me, I’ll have to make my own way
in this world someday.
I figure I’ll need to graduate high school and maybe go to
community college at least.
Daddy and I have not really
talked about it, but we’ll have to soon ’cause he has to sign off
on my course forms for eighth grade
(that’s when Mrs. Yocum says
I should start to take certain science and math classes
if I plan on going to college).
The last time we sat down to talk about school,
I needed his permission to see the seventh-grade health film
When You Become a Woman. I watched him
read over the letter that was printed on pink
paper and sign the bottom with his
big tan left hand, which the pen almost disappeared in, and then
I watched him try to say something about it to me,
but it was for him—I’m pretty sure—like it was for me
in Mrs. Yocum’s office
when I had that rabbit kicking around my insides
and the words got stuck in my throat.
Daddy had to go outside and have a cigarette, and when he
came back in, he said: “If you have
any questions after that movie, you can ask me,”
but even though that’s what his words said, his face said:
“I sure hope you don’t have any questions, Georgia.”
And do you know what? Just two days after we watched
that stupid film in the gym (Tiffany had already shown me
a book she took from her parents’ room,
so I had a pretty good idea where all the parts were
and what they were for), I was in the nurse’s office
asking her for sanitary pads.
But lucky for me, Mrs. Reed is just about the best person
in all of Longwood Middle School. She knows
I get those awful stomachaches and keeps
a big bottle of Rolaids, fruit-flavored, just for me.
She asks only what she has to ask
to fill out the forms that get sent to Guidance,
and mostly she just lets me relax on her couch
whenever I’m feeling bad.
You know, I don’t even think it’s the Rolaids
that make me better. I think it’s just a few minutes of lying
down and being quiet, staring at the fishbowl on her desk
and knowing
she’s not going to send me back to class
until I’m ready.
Anyway, Mrs. Reed gave me these coupons I can use
to buy my own supplies at the store
and asked me if I had any questions,
just like Daddy did. But her face and her words
matched up, so I asked her
three or four things I wasn’t sure about,
and she answered me, patiently, like she wasn’t the school nurse,
but almost like I know you would
if you were here.
9.
“My science teacher says people don’t
die of pneumonia anymore.”
That’s what Tiffany said when she
came up to me in the hall right after biology.
She said it casual, like you might say “It was cloudy today,”
like it was something no one could argue.
I stood there while she hauled up her black hair
into the usual ponytail.
She was wearing three-inch heels,
which made her taller than most of the teachers
and way taller than me.
“True,” I said, tilting my neck back
more than I usually did.
“Most people don’t. But my momma was born
with a weakness in her lungs,
and she had to take this special medicine her whole life,
and she basically hated doctors
on account of having to be a
round them so much as a kid.”
I kicked my locker closed and started walking to lunch.
“When Momma got sick, she and Daddy were
saving up for a house,” I told Tiffany, offering to split
my bag of Cheese Nips.
“A doctor’s appointment would cost,
and Momma kept telling Daddy it was just
a bad flu, like a lot of folks got that winter.”
Tiffany took the Cheese Nips and gave me
her bite-size Milky Way. She looked sorry
for bringing up the subject.
But it was okay—
it felt good, in a strange sort of way,
to talk about it.
10.
Early dismissal today. I was home at 1:05,
an hour and a half earlier than usual. Mr. Fitz’s horse, Ella,
followed me up the lane, and as I passed
the last gate at the top of the pasture,
she whinnied at me so pathetically, I dropped
my backpack and went inside.
We have this game where I hide a treat in one of my pockets
and she has to do a few tricks for me
before I let her find it. I’ve taught her to nod yes,
count to six (sometimes she paws the ground, sometimes
she stomps, but I give her credit for either),
and shake all over
like she’s a dog just come out of a river. She can also laugh
(she lifts her upper lip and waves it around),
but we’re still working on that one.
You know, I think it’s a good thing that Ella has me
to see that she’s more than just
an animal with good bloodlines,
more than a ribbon-winning jumper, something to show off
to the crowd on Sundays. Today, when I watched her
race around the pasture in the powdery snow
just for the fun of it,
or in the summer when she
rolls in the mud after a hard rain,
or splashes her hoof in the trough ’cause she likes the sound,
I know that’s when she’s happiest.
Of all the horses that have boarded here,
Ella is the smartest and the sweetest, and Mr. Fitz